"Outer City"/Inner Suburb Beyond the Center: Physical, Social, and Cultural Landscapes of Immigration in Paris, Toulouse, and Atlanta
When: Saturday, November 5, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Film Festival Series
When: November 1- 4
The College of Architecture, the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies and the Office of International Education at Georgia Tech, hosted a conference on the banlieues of France and the inner suburbs of Atlanta, two suburban conditions that have much to teach us through a comparison of how they are conceived, perceived, and lived.
While the banlieues of Paris and other major cities in France continue to receive fevered attention from media, politicians, academics, and design professionals, the inner suburbs of Atlanta remain under the radar, their demographic transformation over the last twenty years largely overlooked by popular media, policy makers, and designers.
As sites of significant immigrant and second-generation communities, both offer important insights into the cultural and social change occurring in France and the United States today.
The conference put these transformations in both a historical and a cross-cultural perspective.
Invited participants — academics, architects, artists and policy-makers — focused on demographics, urban policy, architecture, and cultural production in order to explore relationships between the physical and cultural fabric of suburban Paris and Atlanta, terrains that are simultaneously both homogenous and degraded and heterogeneous and fertile.
Preceding the conference, a film series was also presented that highlighted the subjects discussed during the conference.
Download the Film Program :
- French Film Series Program
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE 
Morning Session: 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Welcome: Vicki Birchfield, Carole Scipion; Overview of Symposium: Sabir Khan; Introduction to Kwanza Hall who will introduce Pierre Cohen
Pierre Cohen, Mayor of Toulouse
The role of the state; an overview of urban policies and political initiatives at the national and local level in order to provide a context for recent and future efforts to address diversity in urban and suburban environments.
Architecture and Urbanism: Frédéric Druot, Architect and Urbanist, Paris
An approach to existing and new social housing that takes into account "what and who is already there", emphasizing transformation over demolition, and the needs and desires of residents over planning formulas.
Demographics and socio-spatial configurations: Jean-Louis Pan Ké Shon, INED, Paris
A statistical portrait of ethnicity, class, spatial segregation, social polarization, and residential mobility in the HLM’s and ZUS’s around Paris.
Art and Life: Mohamed Bourouissa, artist
A first person account through a discussion of his photographs.
Cultural and Civic Life: Stéphanie Binet, Author and Journalist, "Liberation", Paris
A report on the diversity of cultural and civic life in the banlieues and the various initiatives, structures, and conditions that enable and support it.
Panel Discussion with Druot, Pan Ké Shon, Benguigui, and Mohamed Bourouissa (TBC), artist and photographer. Moderated by Stéphanie Binet.
Afternoon Session: 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Immigration: The South, the Suburbs, and Atlanta: Sabir Khan
An contextual account of immigration to the Atlanta metro region.
The Last Twenty Years: The Social and Cultural Landscapes of "Displaced in the New South".
Panel discussion with, and presentations by: Teodoro Maus, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights; Suttiwan Cox, DeKalb Path Academy; Christiane Lauterbach, Knife & Fork
Taking stock of changes in the physical, social, material, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the City of Atlanta, and Fulton, DeKalb, and Gwinnett counties in the years since the ground-breaking documentary by David Zeiger and Eric Mofford (1995).
Immigration, Institutional Invisibility, Everyday Presence: Jamie Winders, Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University
Since the 1990s, immigrant, especially Latino, settlement has transformed the social fabric of many southern cities. This presentation draws on ethnographic research in Nashville, Tennessee, to refract immigrant presence through both their “institutional invisibility” and the social and racial dynamics at the “neighborhood” scale. The combination of these processes is transforming what neighborhoods mean, how they are understood, and what role race plays in these processes. To conclude, the presentation will speak to some of the similarities between Nashville and Atlanta, as well as the new challenges for immigrant daily life and survival that the most recent round of state-level legislation in the South creates.
The Next Twenty Years: Do/How Do The Changed Demographics Signify for the Atlanta Metro — with a Focus on Gwinnett County. Panel discussion with, and presentations by: Ellen Dunham-Jones, author Retrofitting Suburbia, Georgia Tech; Helen Kim Ho, Korean-American Association of Greater Atlanta; Gwinnett County Planning Department (TBC); Gwinnett LCI representative (TBC)
Entrepreneurship, civic and political participation, architecture, housing, urbanism: The changing physical, social, cultural, material, political, legal, and economic landscape.
Closing Session. 5:15 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Framing Immigration: How the American and French Media Shape Public Debate: Vicki Birchfield, International Relations, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Tech and Giovanna Dell’Orto, Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota
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